SAP smashes HANA forecasts, adds big iron benchmark

Next week will see the one year anniversary of SAP's launch of HANA in-memory database processing, and the company is preparing to push the boat out in the wake of better than expected sales.

SAP forecast $100m in revenues from HANA, but doubled that to over $200m and has signed up over 64,000 end users with 354 customers, over half of whom are using it to run non-SAP data. HANA is now integrated with 33 of SAP's products and it has nearly 2,000 consultants working on new systems internally and in the channel.

"It is astonishing what has happened," Dr Vishal Sikka, chief technology officer at SAP, told The Register. "If you'd have asked me, in our wildest dream we would not have imagined that it would be something so astonishing."

The company will be announcing new hardware systems for big iron data processing engines. A benchmarking machine using 4,000 processor cores and 100TB of DRAM has given a 600 millisecond data response time querying a 500TB database, Sikka said. With new Intel processors SAP should be able to push that even higher, he suggested, and so far eight OEMS are building HANA kit.

As part of the birthday jamboree, SAP will also be detailing customer wins, including contracts in the Indian banking sector and the oil industry. Sikka also reported that the $155m HANA Real-Tune Fund for database development was also bearing fruit.

One area Sikka knows SAP is secure is on the patent side. Rival Oracle recently had its fingers burnt in a patent battle with Google, but the use of disruptive intellectual property lawsuits is now common practice. HANA looks bulletproof. "Well you never know, but we have a massive amount of patent coverage on HANA," he said.

It's been a good year for SAP overall. The company's last financial results were some of the best in the company's history, with profits up 88 per cent at €4.88bn, and last week IDC named it the fastest growing vendor in the relational database management systems (RDBMS) market.